SEI Network. Lesson №1 - What is Cosmos and how does it relate to SEI? [ENG Version]

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Each of us as children dreamed of taking our beloved dog under our arm, getting into the first rocket we could find, and conquering the endless cosmos with all its galaxies. Now these thoughts seem so incredibly silly, it's hard to imagine thoughts even sillier.

But what if I told you that such a possibility exists? Of course, you wouldn't believe me and tell me I'm a liar. But you would only be partly right, because at this moment we have a chance to be in real cosmos, but it is not saturated with dark matter and not governed by gravity, but is woven of program code, zeros and ones.

So, I ask for your attention: the Cosmos ecosystem.

Cosmos is a decentralized and scalable ecosystem that links independent blockchains running on the Tendermint Core protocol. It is based on the Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism (BFT*).

Cosmos aims to create a "blockchain Internet," that is, a blockchain network in which participants can decentralizedly interact with each other both within a single blockchain and between several independent blockchains.

But what is the difference between Cosmos and other blockchains? Let's find out!

As far as you know, every blockchain consists of three different layers:

• Consensus level. At this level there is an agreement between the chain participants to make a certain decision;
• Network level. This level is used to transfer data, transactions and consensus-related messages between the participants of the network;
• Application level. There is also where transactions are processed in various ways.

In a network such as Bitcoin and other similar Web 1.0 blockchains, all of these layers are mixed, making it very difficult to create other projects based on it, as well as preventing the introduction of smart contracts.

The famous Vitalik Buterin decided to put Ethereum in a different direction by separating the application level from the network and consensus layers. Thanks to this separation of levels, we were able to create "add-ons" on top of the so-called EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine).

Thus, Ethereum allowed users to introduce such an innovation, at that time, as "Smart Contracts", thanks to which we can now use various decentralized applications and immerse ourselves in the world of De-Fi.

But even though it sounds so bright and beautiful, Ethereum has one big disadvantage - limitation in scalability. That is, all applications built on the Ethereum blockchain will be limited by the parameters of the network itself, such as speed and inability to communicate directly with other networks.

And this is where a project like Cosmos comes to help us and solves the above problems and "unleashes" the hands of developers, allowing them to create not only dApps, but entire blockchains designed to solve certain problems. At the same time, all blockchains and applications created in the Cosmos ecosystem are directly connected to each other, which does not limit them in terms of properties and purposes of application.

All of this is available to us because of the unique ecosystem structure, where each created blockchain is only an application layer, while the Tendermint* core is responsible for the consensus and network layer.

The great thing is that thanks to an interface like ABCI*, any developer can deploy his application or network in any programming language he likes. This can be as much as Java, C++, Go and others.

Of course, using different programming languages is cool, but there is still the problem of writing any application from scratch because it takes a lot of time. But this problem, fortunately, does not apply to this blockchain.

And for this we have to thank the special Cosmos SDK* framework, which allows developers to use ready-made modules and solutions, without wasting time on rewriting what has already been written by others for a long time.

With this structure, we have a direct link between blockchains. But what if we have, say, 100 blockchains? In that case, if we link each blockchain to each other, we would have about 4,950 links, which would put a lot of stress on the network.

But Cosmos developers have taken this point into account by dividing blockchains into Hubs and Zones*.

• Hubs - special blockchains designed to interact between other networks;
• Zones - a regular blockchain that is connected to the Hub.

That is, we don't need to connect each of the 100 blockchains, but, for example, connect only 10 hubs, each with 10 zones.

And we don't have to worry about scalability at all, because Cosmos uses solutions such as vertical and horizontal scalability, which allows thousands of transactions per second without problems or limitations.

The most interesting thing is that each zone can contain absolutely all the coins of the ecosystem. We have this possibility thanks to the IBC* protocol.

The essence of its work is as simple as possible. It locks coins in the sender's network and creates a "mirror image" of those coins in the recipient's blockchain. There is nothing you can do with the blocked coins, which avoids the problem of double spending.

After getting the general picture of how the Cosmos ecosystem works, it's time to understand why this ecosystem is so attractive to Sei Network.
Let's summarize all of the above and identify those reasons.

1. Cosmos is a powerful yet easy-to-develop blockchain, thanks to the Tendermint BFT core and the modularity of the Cosmos SDK.
2. Cosmos allows blockchains to transfer value to each other via IBC while retaining their sovereignty.
3. Cosmos allows blockchain and applications to scale to millions of users through solutions such as: horizontal and vertical scaling.

This is what makes it so attractive for a Sei Network blockchain deployment that will make interacting with the entire ecosystem a dozen times easier. Find out exactly how Sei will do this in the next lesson!

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